A story of two sisters and their tangled relationship, plus maintenance of the laws of the universe
Ellie lives in Boston. She is on her way to DC, where her elder sister Chris has been taking care of their mother, whose condition has slipped into a coma. Chris is the type of elder sister that never, ever stops telling Ellie how worthless she is, how much she clearly doesn’t love their mother as much as Chris does.
Oh, and did I mention that Chris has sent a number of assassination attempts Ellie’s way?
Oh, and did I also mention that their family is among a secret group of people who maintain this universe, and others?
This is the story of The Subtle Art of Folding Space, short story author John Chu’s jump from shorter forms into a full-length novel.
There is a point in the novel where Ellie, and a few others, are discussing the fact that within their society there is apparently a secret cabal of universe tinkerers, maintainers and builders, and how it’s a problem that there are secret factions amongst them. It’s funny, but Ellie never seems to consider that she herself, and all of her colleagues, are in fact a secret cabal within the wider universe, and universes, that the secrecy goes from the very beginning. So let me explain:
Ellie, Chris, their mother, family members and others, some of which are not from this particular universe, and some of which are most definitely not human, are members of a group of people who build, debug and maintain universes, including our own. They do this by means of an attached “sub-universe” called the “skunkworks.” That’s where the universe can be tweaked. Those who can do this are expected to do it not for their own gain, but as an unheralded public good, and as needed. Ellie may not be her mother (who is and was Chief Builder), but when she finds that there’s new hardware and code in the skunkworks, and that someone is exploiting design flaws, she’s forced into action.
The mechanics, methodology and paradigm of maintaining the universe feel somewhat like computer programming, when you have some very old code that has not been completely debugged and probably can’t be. That means continual work for people like Ellie. Just how this all came to be in the first place, and how someone can get initiated into this, are never made clear, but the programming of the universe is a scaffold for telling a story of heart with these characters and their relationships.
Take Chris and Ellie. Chris, as mentioned above, continually tells Ellie she is not good enough and really doesn’t love their mother. Plus the assassination attempts, and the gaslighting. The novel takes pains to have Ellie slowly really realize just how toxic Chris’s relationship with her is, and how it is not a normal sibling rivalry relationship, but something worse. The untangling and exegesis of the Ellie-Chris relationship is what this novel is all about. The skunkworks, the machinations, the secret societies, changes to the universe, and intrigues, all really in the end boil down to Ellie’s relationship with her older sister.
This means that readers who are hoping for even more crunchy details on how these universe maintainers do their work are going to be a bit disappointed. Just enough detail is there to tantalize the reader (such as mentioning casually that a century ago they had to add quantum mechanics to the universe), but it does not go endlessly deep. The sense that we get, and is explicated directly at points, is that maintaining the universe is a thankless job, if you are playing it straight and not for your own gain. It’s a lot of work, scut work, to keep the machinery of the universe running, especially when it’s filled with exploits and code problems.
But the book really isn’t about the mechanics of all this. This is a book about the characters in that space, and what they do, and why, and how they relate to each other. There are also hints, as mentioned above, of various philosophies within the factions of how to do all this.¹
Besides Ellie and Chris (who is not actually on screen so much but remains a looming antagonist), the other major character we get is their cousin Daniel. He is a prodigy of the skunkworks on axes that Ellie is not, and it is clear that he, for all his affability, is extremely competent—and dangerous. I also liked Ahdi, who is Daniel’s boss in the hierarchy (or is he?), and has some rather startling skills of his own. Through Ahdi we get a window into the greater world of the people who maintain the skunkworks of this and other universes, and it’s a tangled relationship map that Ellie, Chris and Daniel are only just getting themselves into.
In many ways, this feels like a multiverse modern world novel that is in conversation with Max Gladstone’s Craft Wars books. Both authors have a strong sense of humanity and relationships, queer-positive worlds, and characters that are dealing with some often unhinged and mighty powers (magic on one side, multiversal manipulation on the other). But what counts is how people deal with such power, and the philosophies of handing it. A lot of the Craft Wars is about how to maintain societies and what it means to siphon off power for your own ends, even with the best of intentions. Here, Ellie and Chris’s relationship, and the fate of their mother, falls squarely into that conversation.
The novel reaches an inflection point in the sisters’ relationship, a very satisfactory ending to a self-contained story. Anyone who has had strained relations with a sibling, especially revolving around their relationship with their parents, can see and get a lot out of the Ellie-Chris relationship. The skunkworks and the problems, personal and otherwise, revealed in the course of the novel are not resolved, and if Chu wanted to write more in this multiverse (I do think he has a lot more to say about power than what he has said here, again, like the Craft Wars ’verse does), I think there’s room here to really explore these ideas with an aggressively character-centered focus.
In other words, I certainly read more novels set in this multiverse.
Pass the bao, and some more novels, John!
Highlights:
- A very strong focus on character dynamics, the Ellie-Chris relationship in particular
- Universe maintenance as computer programming of an old and somewhat creaky system
- This novel made me hungry for bao
Reference: Chu, John. The Subtle Art of Folding Space [Tor, 2026].
¹ The description of exploits and how the universe can be circumvented reminds me a bit of the description of how magic works in Charles Stross’ Laundry Files ’verse, specifically The Regicide Report.
POSTED BY: Paul Weimer. Ubiquitous in Shadow, but I'm just this guy, you know? @princejvstin.
